About me

Eleanor Power is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Methodology. She completed her PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University in 2015. Prior to joining LSE in 2017, she was an Omidyar Postdoctoral Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute.

Research interests

Eleanor is an anthropologist interested in how religious belief, practice, and identity interact with and shape interpersonal relationships.

She studies these dynamics through fieldwork conducted in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, primary among which is social network analysis. Her work is informed by signaling theory and the wider scholarship of human behavioral ecology. She is interested in the dynamics of social networks, especially relative to the factors that influence cooperation, competition, trust, and prestige. More generally, Eleanor is interested in investigating questions regarding: the role of religion in society, the interaction between costly signaling and cooperation, gender differences in prominence and social capital, and the dynamics of gossip and social censure.